Remember the days when your marketing only needed to generate awareness, build interest, and get your buyer to consider your product? Then your sales team swooped in and took it from there. 

Those days are long gone. Now marketing does much more of the heavy lifting before a buyer is ready and willing to engage with sales. (IF they’re even willing to talk to sales!) 

It’s a seismic shift that’s completely transformed how B2B companies need to approach marketing. And it makes fractional marketing the only viable way for middle market businesses to get an effective, strategic, growth-driving marketing function. 

How the Change in Buyer Behavior Complicates B2B Marketing 

The B2B buying journey used to be linear, straightforward, and mostly driven by sales. Now the path is circuitous, complex, lengthy, and almost entirely digital. And Gartner tells us 75% of B2B buyers would rather not engage with sales at all.  

Yes, your buyers are now in the driver’s seat. And thanks to robust AI-powered tools and content-rich websites, they can do all their research about you and your products digitally and independently. They’re way down the revenue funnel by the time they’ve developed a short list and they’re ready for a sales touch. 

Today marketing has the monumental task of nurturing and driving B2B buyers much further along their buying journey. Simply serving up a brochure-ware website, a few blogs, and the occasional LinkedIn post won’t even begin to move the needle. And the old-school way of staffing the marketing function won’t cut it anymore. 

It’s Time to Rethink How You Staff Your B2B Marketing 

If your marketing is going to drive predictable growth, it needs to be strategy-led (not a list of random tactics). It has to be data-driven (not based on hunches and gut instincts). And it has to be AI-enabled (replacing slow, inefficient processes with speed and agility).  

The fact is that modern marketing play a much more strategic role in driving growth. And it’s become a more sophisticated, specialty-rich, technology-powered endeavor. So it takes a team of experienced pros with specialized skills to develop and execute a B2B marketing strategy and plan that delivers a high ROI.  

But your middle market company probably can’t afford a full in-house marketing team at this stage in your lifecycle. You don’t have the budget to build an internal group of experts in strategic marketing planning, digital marketing, content creation, SEO, paid search, PR, marketing automation, and all the other specialty disciplines of revenue-generating marketing. And you can’t devote the time and budget to figuring out how to operationalize AI to improve marketing efficiency and drive better, faster outcomes.  

Fortunately, you don’t have to. 

Why Fractional Marketing Works

For years, middle market companies tried to make do with a lean marketing staff, hiring a couple of smart, hard-working generalists. They got a lot of marketing “things” done. But in the process the business got no measurable ROI. No traction in the market. No competitive advantage. And no marketing results worthy of satisfying the board or investors.  

Now middle market businesses realize that if they expect marketing to drive measurable growth, they need to change their marketing staffing model. And they’ve discovered that fractional marketing is the most effective way forward. 

Fractional marketing is a flexible, scalable model that’s tailor-made for middle market companies. This approach gives your business the marketing flexibility and expertise you need, without the long-term overhead of an internal team. In fact, if you’ve ever asked yourself, “How can we compete with companies that have bigger marketing budgets?” – fractional marketing is the answer. 

What makes the fractional marketing approach so effective for middle market companies? 

• It provides access to the precise slice of specialized skillsets and expertise you need to accelerate your growth and meet aggressive revenue targets. No more, no less. 

• It eliminates unnecessary overhead, leaving more marketing budget available for execution that drives better outcomes and improves ROI.  

• It offers the agility you need in a fast-changing world—so you can adapt your marketing to evolving conditions or scale up to capitalize on emerging opportunities. 

A fixed internal team simply can’t match it. 

How Do You Know Fractional Marketing is Right for Your Business? 

Any growth-minded middle market business will find the fractional model the most efficient, effective way to turn marketing into a predictable revenue generator. But it’s especially beneficial for companies facing these challenges, where the stakes are even higher: 

• You’re entering new markets or targeting new buyer types. 

• You’re expanding your product or service lines. 

• You’re backed by private equity or other investors that want a fast, significant ROI. 

• You’re vying with new, well-funded competitors. 

• Your past marketing efforts have yielded lackluster outcomes. (Or worse, zero results.) 

• You’re struggling to attract and afford experienced, talented marketing professionals. 

• You keep falling short of your revenue goals. 

Why Marketri is the Ideal Partner for Middle Market Businesses 

B2B companies in the middle market turn to Marketri for marketing that attracts the right buyers, moves them through a complex buying journey, and converts them to profitable customers. We’re the fractional marketing partner that helps growth-minded B2B companies build and execute marketing strategies that drive measurable outcomes and generate a high ROI. 

Marketri unifies the four must-have elements that make fractional marketing successful. 

• Strategy: Your Fractional CMO develops a research-driven go-to-market strategy and plan, then oversees its execution by an experienced fractional team.  

• Execution: Your fractional team executes every aspect of your marketing plan flawlessly, with precision and urgency. They’re experts in their specialty, and they know how to leverage AI-enabled tools that make your marketing more effective and efficient.  

• Analytics: We use analytics to measure your marketing against your key performance indicators (KPIs), so you always what you’re getting for your investment.   

• Optimization: Your fractional team leverages data to iterate and optimize your marketing for the best ROI, so you’re continually getting better outcomes. 

As your single-source fractional marketing partner, we deliver everything you need to achieve your growth goals, without the overhead and operational burden of building a large internal team. 

If your business is grappling with more competitors that have deeper pockets, or more pressure to scale on a rapid timeline, contact Marketri for a free consultation. We’ll show you how our fractional marketing model will get your middle market company further, faster. 

This article was originally published May 13, 2020.